IN THE COURTS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS

by S.M. Stirling <joatsimeon@aol.com>

Prologue:

World Science Fiction Convention

Chicago, Earth

Labor Day, 1962

Fred
sat in the suite's bedroom and sipped his beer. A hot, muggy Midwestern early
autumn day was dying outside, but he didn't think he'd gone more than a block
from the hotel since he'd arrived. It had been a wild ride of a con: Nobody
wanted to talk about anything but the pictures from the Russian probe on Venus,
of course. Dinosaurs and Neanderthals and beautiful blond cave-princesses in
fur bikinis... although excitement was building about what the American lander
would find on Mars.

He hadn't wanted to
talk about anything but the Russian probe on Venus—except what the American
probe was going to find on Mars. Orbiters and telescopes over the last few
years had seen what looked like structures and cities. There had been evidence
as far back as Lowell's investigations in the nineteenth
century, and spectroscopes had hinted at free oxygen in the air as far
back as the 1920's, but it was all a whole lot more credible after what had been
found on Venus. The entire world was holding its breath and waiting, when it
wasn't babbling.

Nineteen sixty-two: the year
everything changed.

But
as his agent had told him, the publishers weren't going to pay him to burble, and he had his rent and
groceries to buy regardless of whether or not Mars
turned out to have intelligent life. Plus, fiction of his sort was going to get
a lot more difficult; it had already, in fact. Extrasolar stuff, that was the
ticket... from now on, books set on Mars and Venus were going to be a variety
of...

Westerns, he thought. They'll be like Westerns—like the penny
dreadfuls they wrote while the Old West was still going on.

He'd
heard somewhere that Kit Carson had read dime novels about his own supposed
adventures while he was really a
scout and Indian fighter out in the Rockies. And Buffalo Bill had been taking
his Wild West show around Europe before the last Indian wars had been fought.

And our astronauts... no,
our planetary explorers... will be reading about themselves while they do it;
probably watching movies and TV about themselves while they do it. Louis
l'Amour and James Mitchner will horn in on our
territory. I don't think the President meantNew Frontierquite so
literally, but that's the way it's turning out.

"Come
on, Fred, Carol! They're about to switch from the talking heads to the real
pictures!"

He
picked up his Tuborg—Poul had brought in a case, saying that the occasion
required actual beer, rather than Schlitz—and they walked through into the
lounge of the suite. It was crowded, but virtually none of the fans were there.
Not today, though that young friend of Beam's was off in a corner, the one
doing surveys of the writers for Boeing and the Pentagon.

Someone
kicked a footstool over, and he sank his long, lanky frame down on it; Ted had
the seat in the middle, right in front, but then he was Guest of Honor. There
was an awesome amount of talent in the room now, all the way from Jack—who'd
sold his first story to Gernsback in the 20's, for God's sake!—through the Big
Bull Gorillas like Bob and Arthur to the post-War crowd of Young Turks like him
and Poul and first-timers like young Larry from LA.

"Amazing
we've gone from the first satellite to this in only a little over ten years,"
Isaac said, looking like a balding Jewish leprechaun as he grinned and rubbed
his hands.

"We
had the incentive, once they proved Mars had an oxygen atmosphere back in '47,"
Bob replied. "That's why we had von Braun hard at work from the day we caught
him, and the Russkis were slave-driving their
Krauts too. Without that to push us, we might still be waiting for the first
manned mission to orbit, or even the first satellite."

Then,
softly: "But we do have the motive. A whole world."

"Two,"
his red-headed wife said sharply. "We're not going to let the Reds have Venus
all to themselves, even if they did get the first probe there."

"What's
really bloody amazing is that we're going to watch it on TV. In color,
worldwide, no less," another writer said, in excruciatingly British tones. "Which
is like Ferdinand and Isabella watching Columbus land in a newsreel at the
cinema."

"Hell,
Arthur, you predicted it fifteen years ago," Poul replied, and they all
chuckled. "Or at least you predicted transmission satellites for TV."

"Prediction
is becoming less and less attractive, with actual reports from other planets
expected daily. I think I'll stick to writing historicals and time-travel from
now on and leave the Solar System alone," one tall distinguished-looking man
with a goatee quipped.

"You
lie, Spreggie," Catherine said crisply. "You won't be able to resist it."

Then
all sound died; even breathing seemed hushed. The little crackle as someone
sucked on a cigarette and added to the blue haze of smoke under the ceiling
sounded loud. Walter Cronkite was pontificating on the screen; for once, his
solemnly portentous tones matched the occasion, probably for the first time
since D-day. Werner von Braun was beside him, looking like a cat with little
yellow feathers stuck to his lips... well, a man might, when the US Government
was giving him ten percent of its budget to play with on a lifetime basis. It
might be twenty percent, after this, or more.

Fighting over Berlin is
starting to look a lot less important. To both sides.

Behind
him, a model of the Mars Viking Lander dropped down a hypothetical trajectory
and settled on long spidery legs. Half the fans at this convention were wearing
Viking helmets with horns. Poul grumbled that the horns weren't historical. A
lot of them had added little propellers on top, too.

Bob
began: "You know, I had this idea for another Mars book a couple of years ago,
about an orphan adopted by Martians, but then the preliminary orbital telescope
reports came in and I didn't dare—"

"Now!" someone else said. "Everyone shut up!"

The
color screen flickered, showed snow. A groan started, then cut off abruptly as
the picture cleared save for a few rastor lines; smoke faded away, blown by a
stiff wind. Someone swore softly. The ground in front of the lander was a plain
covered in low-growing reddish-green plants.

"Mars,
Commie-Colored Cabbage Planet," someone said.

That
brought a brief nervous chuckle. The ground cover did look a little like splayed-open cabbages with thick waxy
reddish-green leaves. Here and there was a reddish-gray shrub covered in white
flowers. Neither seemed to want to burn; the circular fire set by the rockets
died quickly.

The
vegetation rippled in the wind, and there was a haze like dust on a horizon
that shaded up to a sky that was pink as much as blue. Low rocky hills showed
in the distance. Between the lander and them was...

"It's
a canal! If only Edgar could be here!"

"Hell
with Burroughs, if only Lowell—"

"Shut
up!"

It was a canal; about fifteen yards wide,
sweeping from left to right and then turning so that it dwindled out of sight
like a perspective drawing, curving to follow the contour of the land, for all
the world like one in California or Arizona... except that it was covered in an
arched roof of some transparent stuff so clear it was barely visible at all.
The banks were reddish man-high stone or concrete, sloping away from the
interior and covered in abstract figures something like hieroglyphics, ancient
and crumbling and faded.

A
low black shape like a flattened turtle that must be the size of a Volkswagen
crawled over the crystal roof without visible means of support, unless there
was something like a snail's foot beneath the carapace.

"Guess
that settles the question of whether those structures we saw from orbit were
the product of intelligence or not," Isaac said dryly.

"That...
turtle, beetle, whatever it is... could be something like a giant social
insect," Frank said stubbornly. "Beavers build dams. That... whatever it is
could be doing it."

"Beavers
don't carve hieroglyphs on them and neither do ants. The hominids—well some of
them—on Venus looked awfully damned human, which means we're not reasoning from
a sample of one any more. Panspermia and parallel evolution—"

"Shut
up!"

The
audio pickups were transmitting a soft whistling of wind, accompanied by a
murmur of commentary from the technicians at Cape Canaveral. There was
something in the sky, something distant and moving slowly—but too quickly for
the pickup to track it with the time-lag factor, so they didn't try. They
waited, and not much happened. A shout went up as a small-and-fuzzy animal
hopped by, but it was gone too quickly to see details except that it precisely
matched the color of the leafy ground cover and jumped on its hind legs.

"Camouflage,"
Beam noted; he'd come into the field in the fifties, but looked older than he
must be. "When you're small and at the bottom of the food chain, you want to be
invisible."

More
of the whatevers hopped around, and turned out to look like desert rats with
tufted tails and squashed-in faces; some of them had miniature versions of
themselves clinging to their backs. A reading of temperature and atmospheric
density came up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

"So
at Martian sea-level the air's a little thinner than Denver," Poul commented,
taking a pull on his beer. "The interior highlands must be like Tibet or the
Bolivian altiplano."

"Yeah,
but with lower gravity—"

"The
dropoff will be slower, yes. Where Viking came down it's chilly and very dry,
but you or I could be comfortable there with a good warm coat."

"So
much for wearing oxygen masks and skating on the canals," Bob said, and
chuckled ruefully.

That
was probably because of the Mars book he had
written back in the early 50's.

Two
masts and yards supported huge gossamer sails that looked like lanteens but
weren't. Galleries and windows ran around the hull; if the builders were sized
anything like human beings, that meant the landship was at least a hundred and
fifty feet long. As it grew closer they saw a figurehead at the front below the
bowsprit, some sort of gruesomely fanged beast...

"Now
we know something about the local wildlife. Something bad," Jack quipped.

"Either
that, or they've been reading Clark Ashton Smith, Jack."

It might be mythological, Fred thought,
over the hammering of his heart. Don't
jump to conclusions.

Closer
still, and there was writing behind the figurehead—symbols at least, with a
generic family resemblance to the ones on the canal banks. Figures moved on the
decks, bending to incomprehensible tasks.

"It's
heading towards the lander!"

It
did, the front pair of outriggers turning, then the hull foreshortening as the
prow swung towards the camera. The sails twisted and did something; Poul liked
messing about in boats, and he murmured about pointing into the wind.

"Beat-up
old... whatever-it-is," Fred heard himself say.

Closer
to they could see that most of the structure was made out of some dense
close-grained reddish wood, intricately carved but worn and patched and
replaced in places. But other sections like the outriggers were strange, glossy
and looking like metal or crystal or some unearthly—

Watch it! he told himself.

—alloy.

The
sails came down neatly as the craft coasted to a halt. They couldn't see all of
that, for it was too close now; they could see how the big wheel at the end of
one of the outriggers effortlessly climbed over a boulder, the tire deforming
and springing back as it did so.

"That
wheel looks as if it were spun somehow,
out of resilient crystalline wire," Bob commented. "Nice engineering. It must
grip like fingers. Do we have anything that could do that? They may be ahead of
us in some fields."

"But
they're using sails for propulsion,"
the editor of Astounding said.

His
head pushed forward pugnaciously, and he crushed out a cigarette. "I refuse to
believe we're not the most advanced species in the Solar System. We're going to
them, after all, not them to us."

"Mars
is smaller than Earth," Bob replied. "There may not be any fossil fuels or
fissionables. Our rockets burn hydrogen cracked with power from burning coal,
or oil, or more and more from nuclear power. We're testing atomic-powered
rockets for deep-space work, for the manned missions, to get us out there in person—"
he nodded at the screen. "Lack of power sources would push Martian development
into other paths."

Beam
drew thoughtfully on his pipe, a minor affectation. "Or they may have come to
us first... but a very long time ago, and then they had a Dark Age or two. And
to Venus. That would account for—"

"Lookatthat!"
Larry cried joyfully.

A
ramp dropped from under the snarling figurehead, and a dozen figures descended.

"Martians,"
someone said reverently. "Men from Mars."

"Humanoids
from Mars, at least," someone else murmured with the abstracted air of a man
taking mental notes. "Bilaterally symmetrical bipeds... hard to tell more with
the way they're muffled up, there might be tails under those robes... their
joints bend the same way as ours... look, four fingers and a thumb on the
inside! Definitely hominid, like the
ones on Venus!"

"And
those are weapons," Beam said. "Rifles, pistols..."

"And
they're all wearing swords," Sprague commented. "And one of them has a bow.
Unless they're very primitive firearms, muzzle-loaders, you'd expect edged
weapons to go out of use fairly quickly."

"Could
be some sort of honor code. Maybe Burroughs got that right too! Gentlemen don't
use a gun if the other guy draws a sword."

"Nobody's
that honorable," Sprague said. "Not
in the real world... worlds. Not for long; the cheaters win too often. This
place the probe's in could be the equivalent of, oh, nineteenth century India
or Africa, and the weapons are imported from elsewhere—a transitional phase."

"Hey,
look, the one with the bow doesn't have a nose—or at least it's a real stub
under that headdress. Look, he's turning his head again—you can see it when
he's in profile."

"They're
not primitive guns," Beam said flatly; he was an expert, and a crack shot
himself. "I can't make out the mechanisms but the barrels are too slender and
too precisely formed for that."

Fred
peered more closely. The figures cautiously approaching the lander were swathed
in clothing—the basic garment seemed to be a loose wide-sleeved and calf-length
robe a bit like an Arab burnoose with
an attached headdress that hid everything but a slit over the eyes... or what
were presumably eyes. Beneath that he could see baggy pants and boots, and
gloves that covered quite humanlike hands. Broad belts and body-harnesses of
worked leather carried tools and weapons—long curved knives with carved hilts,
swords whose guards were intricately worked cages of some glossy stuff,
holsters with slender-barreled pistols and fanciful grips.

One
had a bandolier of rope and a grappling tool looped over one shoulder. All of
them had something like a cargo hook clipped to their body harness. Another
bore something that looked roughly like a rifle as well, with a long thin
barrel and a short bulbous body and a skeletal stock. The archer had a quiver
over the shoulder and a strung bow, a complex-looking recurved thing that
reminded him a little of pictures he'd seen of Chinese archery.

The
robe of the figure in the lead was a dusty rose-color edged with black, and
there were jewels and goldwork on the harness. The ones behind ranged from
someone nearly as gorgeous to plain brown patched cloth.

"The
captain and officers and crew," someone murmured. "Or something like that."

They
came closer and closer, until eyes showed through the slits in their
headdresses—humanlike, but detail was frustratingly absent. All were tall and slim despite the muffling
cloth; Fred estimated the leader as most of the way to seven feet. The
leader... might as well call him the
Captain... drew his sword. Light shimmered off the metal; it was
double-edged and looked disconcertingly sharp, but not exactly like steel.

"Cut-and-thrust
blade," Sprague said. "More thrust than cut. A good deal like some
seventeenth-century European types."

Everyone
caught their breath as the captain
turned and spoke to his... men? The voice sounded human, perhaps a little
high-pitched, but the language was wholly unfamiliar. It sounded ripplingly
musical with an occasional staccato burst...

"Tonal
and monosyllabic, I think, like Chinese," Sprague went on, as two of the robed
humanoids turned and trotted back towards the ship. "Maybe. Difficult to learn,
if it is. I'll bet the grammar is analytic, too."

The
captain turned back and prodded the lander, reaching up; they could all hear
the tunk... tunk... as the point of
the blade prodded the light-metal hull.

The
television spoke. "We are attempting to communicate. The message shall be: We come in peace for all mankind."

"Some
advertising man thought that up,"
Fred said, and there was a nervous chuckle; everyone knew how he felt about them.

Minutes
passed, and the English words sounded, tinny and strange through the pickup in
the thin Martian atmosphere. The Martians jumped back; the one with the bow
turned and ran. A rifle came up and fired—there was no bang, no flash or smoke,
just a slight hsssst sound, but the
lander rang under an impact.

The
Captain didn't run. Instead he shouted something in the musical language and
waved the long blade at his followers. One hurried back up the ramp and returned
with a folded tarpaulin; the Martians threw it over the lander, and then the
screen went dark. Creaking noises followed.

Poul
broke the long silence with a guffaw. "They're putting it on board, by God!
They swung a yard over and tied it up in a sack and they're hoisting it on
deck!"

Walter
and Werner came back on, both looking sandbagged and starting to stammer
explanations that couldn't possibly have anything behind them.

"I
knew it!" Leigh shouted, punching her fist into the air. "I told you sons of...
sons what it would be like years ago!"

A
rebel yell cut loose, and suddenly the room was a babble of voices.

@@@

Several
years later, the captain's words were determined to be in the Tradeship dialect
of Demotic Modern, and tentatively translated:

"It's alive! Those fools at the Scholarium
will pay a fortune for this!"